Author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (which earned me an MLA William Scarborough Prize) and King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr., both published by Duke Univ. Press, I am also the proud co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Additionally, I have authored a short biography of Langston Hughes for junior high and high school students, and have several scholarly articles to my name, ranging topically from the religious roots of African American literature to photography, disability, and black oratory.